[PHOTO] Mona Lisa as a Cat, Cube Works Studio, Distillery District

The Cube Works Studio in the Distillery District has some fun works on display.

[LINK] "Laurel Broten to impose contracts on Ontario public school teachers"

The Toronto Star's Rob Ferguson and Richard J. Brennan report on the news that the Ontario education minister, member of a Liberal minority government generally agreed to be on the way out, has forced--without negotiations--a new collective agreement on teachers. I have to agreee with Di Novo: the rotating one-day teacher strikes that have made their way across Ontario are only going to be the beginning.

(Will this help the NDP in the upcoming elections? Will it help the Conservatives more?)

Education Minister Laurel Broten is imposing contracts on public school teachers under the controversial Bill 115 but has promised to repeal it because the wage freeze law has become a “lightning rod.”

“It’s an important step to find a way forward with our teachers,” she said Thursday in a reference to labour strife that has seen public elementary teachers hold one-day rotating strikes and join high school teachers in boycotting extracurricular activities.

[. . .]

The contracts imposed on public teacher unions at boards other than the 65 where deals have already been reached will be retroactive to last Sept. 1 and expire on Aug. 31, 2014.

Deals will freeze wages for most teachers but allow younger ones to continue moving up through the salary grid while cutting sick days in half to 10 and ending the banking of unused sick days for cash out upon retirement as the government fights a $14 billion deficit. The contracts mirror a deal negotiated with the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association last summer.

“This is cynical politics at its worst,” said New Democrat MPP Cheri DiNovo (Parkdale—High Park), whose party voted against Bill 115, which passed last fall with support from the Progressive Conservatives.

DiNovo said she finds it “very hard to believe” repealing Bill 115 and imposing contracts will end the “disturbance” in classrooms.

“Nobody falls for this.”

[LINK] "The Gay Teen-Boy Romance Comic Beloved by Women in Japan"

The Atlantic's Noah Berlatsky takes a look at an exemplar of Japanese yaoi manga, Heart of Thomas (Thomas no Shinzō), and asks why explicitly homoerotic manga are so popular among Japanese women. Berlatsky comes up with some interesting suggestions.

Matt Thorn offers a couple of explanations. One is historical; Hagio was directly inspired by the tragic romanticism of Jean Delannoy's 1964 filmLes amities particuliéres, about two boys who fall in love at a boarding school. But Thorn also suggests that there were formal and thematic reasons for the choice. Hagio actually initially tried to set the story in a girls' boarding school—but found that she ended up wanting to make the action, as Thorn says, too "realistic and plausible." The result was, in Hagio's words, "sort of giggly." Thorn concludes that "It was important that the characters be Other in order for Hagio to explore the themes, some quite abstract, that she wanted to explore."

I don't disagree with Thorn's analysis of Hagio's motivations, but I think it's worth thinking a bit more about why and how it's important for the characters in Heart of Thomas to be Other, and why that would be something women respond to. Specifically, I'd argue that a big part of the appeal of setting the comic at a boys' school is that it allows male, European characters to be objectified, just as Asian women often are in Western fiction. In a lot of ways, The Heart of Thomas is an Orientalist harem fantasy in reverse. Instead of a Westerner thinking about veiled maidens on cushions in some distant palace, the Japanese Hagio fantasizes about beautiful boys in an exotic Europe.

The genre of boys' love, in other words, allows Hagio and her readers to place themselves in a position of power and aggrandizement that is rare for women—as the distanced, masterful position, letting his (or her) eyes roam across variegated objects of desire. It is, then, perhaps, no accident that the villain of The Heart of Thomas—a boy named Siegfried—is distinguished primarily by his interest in the Renaissance and by his odd, octagonal glasses. Siegfried's fetishization of old Europe parallels Hagio's fetishization of contemporary Europe; his dangerous gaze parallels Hagio's dangerous gaze. And Siegfried's abuse of Juli, the protagonist, is congruent with Hagio's own stylized sexualization of her characters. His desire is her desire—and also, perhaps, the desire of her readers. Thus, the prurient fan-service which is usually doled out only to men is here explicitly taken up by women, who get to watch more exotic male bodies than you can shake a spectacle at.

But while Hagio may be Siegfried, she isn't only Siegfried. Rather, the primary emotional point of identification in the book is Juli, or, more precisely, Juli's trauma. That trauma is, again, sexual trauma—or rape. In this sense, the book does not emphasize, or insist on the distance between characters and author or audience. Instead, Juli's rape emphasizes the universality what is often presented as a particularly female experience. Similarly, Juli's shame, his self-loathing, and his tortured effort to allow himself to love and be loved, are all character traits or struggles which are often stereotyped as feminine. The fact that Juli is male seems, then, not an aspect of otherness, but rather a way to underline his similarity to Hagio and her audience. If readers can with Siegfried experience distance as mastery, with Juli they experience an empathic collapse of distance so powerful it erases gender altogether.

[LINK] "Taiwan moves on gay marriage"

Months after Vietnam announced its intention to study same-sex marriage in that East Asian country, Shanghaiist reports that Taiwan is set to become the first Asian country to officially recognize same-sex marriage. Procedural issues, interestingly, seem to be the main problems at hand.

The current proposal changes only articles 972, 973 and 980 of the Civil Code, altering the words from ‘male’ and ‘female’ to gender-neutral language.

But Hsu Li-ying, from the Judicial Yuan's (Supreme Court) Juvenile and Family Department, said the new legislation ‘may need to be more comprehensive’.

However, speaking at Taiwan’s first legislative hearing on legalizing gay and lesbian marriages Hsu made no alternative proposal.

The hearing was attended by legislators, lawyers, gay rights activists and scholars.

Deputy Justice Minister Chen Ming-tang told them that it wasn’t just the Civil Code that would have to change, but also laws regarding parentage, taxes or health insurance. That meant that the Justice Ministry couldn’t do it alone, he said.

Meanwhile Chen Wei-lien, director of the Ministry of Justice's Department of Legal Affairs, suggested they would invite a scholar specializing in the Civil Code to look at Taiwanese attitudes to same-sex marriage early next year.

A poll in September by United Daily News showed 55% approval of gay marriage laws with only 37% against.

But it also found 61% couldn’t accept their children being gay with only 37% saying they could.

[LINK] "North Korea a culture of warriors"

An interesting Asia Times article by one Tatiana Gabroussenko makes the case that North Korean popular culture over the past sixty years has diverged strongly from the south, with the hard-edged militarism and lack of sentimentality cultivated by the north strongly contrasting with the South's norms.

A comparison of North and South Korean paradigms demonstrates that the major rupture between two halves of a once homogeneous culture which has been occurring over the last 60 years lies not in their respective attitudes to communism. In many aspects, purely communist messages of North Korean discourse are congruent with communal values of patriarchal Korea and may be quite appealing to a regular South Korean.

What in fact differentiates the North Korean spiritual world from the South Korean one is it's radical departure from civil traditions of the Confucian learned gentlemen, which traditionally despise brute force and military violence.

North Korean ideology has significantly redefined Korea's past, present and future. When depicting traditional Korea, North Korean media tend to downplay its Confucian legacy and falsely represent old Korea as an essentially martial state. According to a popular ideological myth, obligatory military service allegedly enjoyed such a high prestige in old Korea that it was widely considered a kind of initiation process for young men, without passing of which they were not allowed to marry.

[. . .]

A consistent injection of this idea into generations cannot pass without consequences. Warriors who are trained to fight against named enemies, the South Korean president among them, will search for their battlefield and are likely eventually to find it.

Meanwhile, South Korean upbringing is rapidly moving towards the opposite direction. On the one hand, it largely continues Confucian traditions of the prevalence of intellectual development over the body. On the other hand, this Confucian legacy has been augmented by the educational trend of contemporary Western democracies, with their emphasis on pacifism, tolerance and leniency to human weaknesses.

One of the recent mantras of South Korean pedagogy is curbing children's aggression and discouraging violent games and toys. A range of parental books on the shelves of the largest Seoul bookshop, Kyobomungo, calls on South Korean fathers to refrain from any aggression, both physical and verbal, when dealing with their children and to inspire their offspring to do the same at schools and playgrounds.

[. . .]

In a prosperous, humane and caring world of South Korean children, everyday violence is hidden from the public eye; this is a world with an increasing number of vegans, animal shelters, and a thriving pet industry. For a young South Korean child today, a rabbit, for instance, is associated with a fluffy toy or a cute domestic companion. In the harsh reality of North Korean children, rabbits are domestic animals that are valued for their skin, meat and fur.

Nation-wide campaigns encourage North Korean kindergarteners to raise rabbits and children "to make food and clothes for the brave uncle soldiers of the Korean People's Army".

Are South Koreans prepared to deal with their brothers in the North?

The popularity of the ideal of reunification in South Korea has been dropping for some time, driven substantially on the economic and financial costs of reunification. If South Koreans come to feel that they don't share that many cultural traits in common with North Koreans--if, in fact, the emerging norms of South Korean culture are held in contempt by North Koreans--what incentive, exactly, to South Koreans have to reunify? What is there to reunify at all? I wonder.

[LINK] "How Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Helped to Invent Everything You Love"

Writing at io9, Charlie Jane Anders makes the case for the critical importance of Deep Space 9

20 years ago today, the very first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine aired on American television. And Star Trek would never be the same again — but Deep Space Nine also had a lasting impact on all genre television. The grittiest of Star Trek series helped to give us a lot of the things we take most for granted on science fiction and fantasy television today — and here are just a few of the ways.

Those long, sweeping arcs. It seems like a weird thing to mention now, because every random cop show or space adventure has storylines that carry on from episode to episode, more like serialized novels than collections of self-contained stories. But back when Deep Space Nine started, the idea of following "arcs," especially ones that went on for more than one season, was still more unusual on TV. For a Star Trek show, especially, it was considered weird to have so many continuing storylines.

As writer/producer Ron Moore said, in an interview at TrekMovie:

The Enterprise, like I said earlier, could pull up to a planet and have an episode and keep going. With Deep Space Nine, anything that took place on the station, well guess what? Next week you are still on the station. And Bajor is not going anywhere. So really you had to keep playing those stories. You couldn't make a big change in Bajor's political structure in one week and then ignore it then next. You had to keep it going. Kira's story with his relationship with Bajorans had to keep evolving and so did Sisko's and they had a long-term mission. They had a mission about Bajor into the Federation. That alone meant that it was going to be serialized at least on that front.

Anders goes on to identify multiple other legacies of the best Star Trek--the place given to religion, the exploration of the ethics of terrorism, and so on. While commenters who point out the similar role of Babylon 5, I'm inclined to think that these two shows of the 1990s often worked in parallel to each other without imitating each other.